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dead-head_Monte |
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April 26, 2012 09:55:25am |
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Re: CISPA and NSA new threat to the Internet |
DemocracyNow! — a daily independent global news hour — April 26, 2012
Targeted Hacker Jacob Appelbaum on CISPA, Surveillance and the "Militarization of Cyberspace"
• http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/26/targeted_hacker_jacob_appelbaum_on_cispa
Computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum argues the measures included in the proposed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) would essentially legalize military surveillance of U.S. citizens. "When they want to dramatically expand their ability to do these things in a so-called legal manner, it’s important to note what they’re trying to do is to legalize what they have already been doing," Appelbaum says. He is a developer and advocate for the Tor Project, a network enabling its users to communicate anonymously on the internet, and has volunteered with WikiLeaks.
• https://www.torproject.org/
What is Tor?
Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.
Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol. Get involved with Tor »
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jacob Appelbaum, I wanted to ask you about a recent report by the Brookings Institute, not exactly a liberal or progressive think tank. But they did a paper called "Recording Everything: Digital Stories as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments." And some of the quotes here are astonishing. They say, quote, "Plummeting digital storage costs will soon make it possible for authoritarian regimes to not only monitor known dissidents, but to also store the complete set of digital data associated with everyone within their borders."
They go on to say, "When all of the telephone calls in an entire country can be captured and provided to voice recognition software programmed to extract key phrases, and when video footage from public spaces can be correlated, in real time, to the conversations, text messages and social media traffic associated with the people occupying those spaces, the arsenal of responses available to a regime facing dissent will expand. Pervasive monitoring will provide what amounts to a time machine allowing authoritarian governments to perform retrospective surveillance."
This is where the United States is heading, where other authoritarian regimes, much more authoritarian regimes than ours, are heading around the world. And yet, the level of public opposition, especially among some young people, to this continued invasion of their privacy is not that — I mean, it’s strong, it’s growing, but it’s not where it should be.
JACOB APPELBAUM: It’s pretty concerning. I think one thing that’s important to note here is that it’s not a theoretical thing. For example, the WikiLeaks "Spy Files" showed that this kind of dragnet surveillance of all the phone calls of a country is in fact a product that is often sold. I believe it was Libya that purchased some of this equipment from a company called Amesys in France. So, it seems to me that people will try to dismiss it and say, "Well, they’ll never be able to analyze that kind of data." But that’s the problem they’ve been working on for the last 20 years, but especially in the last 10 years. So it’s not only that this data is being collected, but now they want to share it with the Department of Homeland Security, with the FBI and the NSA, essentially legalizing military surveillance over U.S. civilians — and the whole planet, frankly. So this has dramatic international implications in addition to national implications. And this is the same FBI that abuses the national security letters that have been given to them in the USA PATRIOT Act that abuses their authority on a regular basis. And they want to be without some kind of judicial oversight for all of their actions.
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